Seasonal serendipity: Too much Monkee business? Not this time
December 25, 2024
Bill Taylor writes: I wasn't even thinking of the band when some inscrutable algorithm dropped this into my feed ~ the perfect gift, new, unexpected and quite lovely. Call it a Christmas cracker:
Hey, hey, they were the Monkees and people said they monkeyed (monkeed?) around…
Hard to believe that it’s getting close to 60 years since Americans Michael Nesmith, Mickey Dolenz and Peter Tork, and a Mancunian, Davy Jones, were recruited to play the members of a fictitious pop group for a TV sitcom, eponymously titled The Monkees.
Any resemblance to a certain mop-topped foursome from Liverpool and their two highly successful movies was quite nakedly intentional.
(The Monkees, 1965. L-R: Jones, Dolenz, Nesmith. Tork. IMDb image)
Younger readers of this site may never have heard of the show, the band or its relentlessly jovial theme tune. Until now. (Don’t worry, it’s short.)
The Monkees, which ran on TV from 1966 to ’68, was a mish-mash of puerile plotting, madcap chase scenes and slapstick humour, leavened with songs. Much of it was instantly forgettable and word spread that the four couldn’t even play their own instruments.
But that didn’t stop them racking up worldwide sales of more than 75 million records, including four chart-topping albums and three smash-hit singles.
It was a slander, anyway. All four were accomplished musicians.
Mickey Dolenz (who'd been a child-star in a kids’ TV series called Circus Boy) was already a rock singer when he joined the Monkees; Mike Nesmith was a country singer-songwriter; Peter Tork a folksinger; and Davy Jones had played the Artful Dodger in the original West End and Broadway productions of Lionel Bart’s musical Oliver!
For all that, the Monkees’ 1967 Christmas special show looked like following the old cornball formula, with the boys babysitting a nasty little rich kid and – of course – eventually instilling him with the true spirit of the season.
The musical interlude, though, was a real eye-opener – no bouncy bubble-gum tune with a video of the band clowning around, but a straight-on acapella rendition of a Spanish carol, attributed to Catalan composer Mateo Flecha the Elder in the mid-16th century.
Riu, Riu, Chiu (apparently a call used by Basque shepherds as they guarded their flocks) presents the shepherd as God, the lamb as the Virgin Mary, and the wolf as Satan.
It’s a beautiful song. Beautifully sung. What more needs to be said? No more Monkee tricks.
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